We talked about this a bit back in episode 107, but this episode is actually about a lot more than it looks like on the surface. When we know what to look for, this is the most powerful promise yet about the Messiah, Jesus. God made a promise to Eve, and now He makes an even greater promise to Abram! This will be the last lesson in Gen 15.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without reading an entire chapter every week!)

Today we are finishing up Genesis 15, and you guys have learned so much. But you haven’t learned the most important part yet! God promised Abram the Land, a child, and told him to go fetch a bunch of critters for a special ceremony that we only ever see one more time in the Bible, and, as you remember, that one didn’t go so well for the citizens of Jerusalem! But this is possibly the most important covenant anywhere in the Hebrew Bible because this one is the forever promise that gave us Jesus! When normal people would perform this ceremony, which is called the Covenant of the Pieces, they would cut the animals in half and place the pieces on opposite sides to make a path down the middle. The two people would say, “Whoever breaks this covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to him!” Then they promised by the names of their gods to be faithful, and they believed their gods would take revenge for making them look bad if they didn’t. That’s why Abram has been shooing all those birds away—he has been waiting for God to show up somehow to walk through the animal parts with him. But then Abram was put into a deep vision where everything was scary and dark, and God told Abram what would happen to him and his family in the future. What happened next was completely shocking and unexpected.

When the sun had set, and it was dark, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch appeared and passed between the divided animals. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “I give this land to your offspring, from the Brook of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River: the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.” (Gen 15:17-21)

What??? Abram didn’t walk between the pieces? And why on earth did a smoky firepot and a flaming torch float through them instead? This just doesn’t make any sense at all, right? No Abram and no God either. Or was there? What was the smoke and the fire all about anyway? God tells His people all through the Bible that He doesn’t have a body, even though everyone else believed that the gods of the nations had bodies like ours. God isn’t a human. He doesn’t have DNA, so God isn’t really even a man either, or a woman. God is just described in ways that help us to understand that He can be like a father, like a mother, like a mamma bird, like a king, like a husband, and like a whole lot of things. But God isn’t a person in any way that we could possibly understand—even though sometimes He does seem to show up in human form or speaks through the Angel of the Lord. It is just all very confusing because our brains are small, and God is big. I suppose it would be really nice not to have a body sometimes—a lot less complicated, that’s for sure.

So, what’s the deal with the smoke and fire?? One of the ways we see God showing up in the book of Exodus is specifically as a cloud of smoke and a column of fire. The cloud of smoke protected the Israelites from the hot sun during the day, and the fire kept them warm all night—pretty awesome, right? And maybe you remember God speaking to Moses through a burning bush where the fire didn’t hurt that bush at all! And later, God told Moses and Aaron that He would appear above the ark of the covenant in the Tabernacle, with His glory hidden in a cloud. When the Temple was built, and Solomon threw a huge celebration in God’s honor, a cloud came into the Temple that was so big and amazing that the priests had to get out because it was too intense for them to handle! When Elijah was proving to the priests of Baal that their god wasn’t even real, God proved that He was very real by sending fire down from heaven to burn up an animal on an altar that was completely soaked with water and even had a moat around it! Other times in the Bible, God says He is coming on the clouds, and that always means that somebody is in big trouble and someone else might even get rescued. Jesus said in the Gospel stories that He would be coming in the clouds and that it would be bad news for the people who were lying about him, including the high priest, just so that they could get the Romans to kill him. And let me tell you a secret–when Jesus said that, it made those guys just furious because they believed that only God could judge the high priest.

The smoke and the fire were a promise of protection. This promise told Abram that until the end of the world, God would always have His eye on the children of Abram—no matter what. Abram doesn’t know all of this, of course, because none of it had happened yet, but God was giving Abram a clue about how He would appear to the children of Israel in the future. Abram was probably very confused about the smoke and the fire until he heard God’s voice saying that the covenant between them was forever and that his children would inherit everything the Canaanites had all around him. And some of those Canaanites were even called giants! But what did it mean that only God passed through the animal pieces? Certainly, God wasn’t going to break His promise to Abram or do anything wrong. But whoever goes through the animal parts is supposed to die if they break the promise. And, one day, Abram’s descendants would completely break their pledge to serve, obey, love, and worship God. They would fill His land with idols and even His own Temple. They would bow down to the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and when they did that—it meant they were putting their butts in the air toward God’s Holy of Holies. They baked unleavened bread for the Queen of Heaven, who was either Ishtar or Asherah—we aren’t really sure. Women cried and cried at the Temple for the Babylonian shepherd god Tammuz during the summer months when they thought he was trapped in the land of the dead, and there was no rain. They did absolutely everything God told them not to do. And so, one day, the cloud that God’s glory was hiding in just up and left and never came back. Isn’t that sad? God loved them so much that He stayed for hundreds of years while they did those things to Him. And the prophets had all warned the people, but nobody listened.

When God left His Temple, the people weren’t protected anymore, and the Babylonians came and destroyed the city and the Temple and took all the wealthy and powerful people so far away that they would never be able to go home again. But God wasn’t through with His people. He still loved them because He remembered how much He loved Abraham. Abraham’s descendants had broken God’s covenant, but because Abraham hadn’t walked with God through those animals, someone else had to make things right again. God’s people, even when He brought some of them back to the land of Israel, had to serve cruel pagan kings for another five hundred years! And they were always praying for the Messiah to come and rescue them, and to destroy all their enemies. They wanted their own kingdom again, with their own King. They wanted everything to be like the “good old days” but a whole lot better because the “good old days” are never really all that good for most people. They studied the Bible, and they could see that God had promised a new and better king who would come from King David’s family. Sometimes, that King would seem like a mighty warrior, but at other times, it seemed like he was rejected, hated, and very humble. Some even thought that maybe God would send them the King they deserved—one kind if they were worthy and doing what God wanted and another kind if they weren’t doing what God wanted.

What they never suspected was a King who would be both—a King who would be gentle, trustworthy, and loving toward people who were hurting but who would be a mighty warrior against demons, sickness, and everything that was hurting His people. A King who loved them all so much, not just them but all the world, that He would make everything right between them and God again and teach them how to trust God. He showed them exactly what God is like by just being Himself. And that King, of course, is Jesus. Do you remember when we learned about God’s Creative Word all the way back in episode #2? Jesus has always been with God (no one knows Him better!), and Jesus is how God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Everything good that we see around us, including the stars in the sky and all the planets, is God’s love for us poured out through Jesus. God didn’t need a planet, and He sure doesn’t need food or water. He created all of those things because we need them, and He was making a good home for us. But when Adam and Eve sinned, the world got broken. It was still good because God’s creation is good, but things were broken. God told Adam and Eve that there would one day be a child who would come from a woman who would fix everything they had messed up when they tried to be like God.

When the smoke and the fire passed in between the animal parts, God was making a forever promise that the child would somehow come out of Abram’s family—but this isn’t the first time God had hinted at that. Do you remember when God first spoke to Abram at the beginning of chapter twelve? God told Abram that he would be a blessing to all the families of the earth! Did Abram understand what that meant? His family were all idol worshipers from Babylon. Abram was commanded to get away from them! Many generations had passed since Noah and Abram’s ancestor Shem had come off the ark. Did anyone still remember that God had promised to send someone to crush the head of the serpent who had tricked Adam and Eve into rebelling against God? Or had people given up hope so long ago that they had to be reminded again? Whether Abram understands everything or not, we know that God is always busy setting up His plans to rescue us from sin and death. This was a big step. The family was chosen at last, and now that Abram had finally obeyed everything God had commanded him (it took ten years), God is rewarding Abram. It’s like God is saying, “Okay, Abram, you did what I asked, and so now everything comes down to you and me. You are my choice to start a new family, and that family will become a great people, and one day, one of your own children will bless every person who will ever live. And whatever goes wrong between now and then, I will make things right. My plans don’t depend on you and your kids doing everything right. One of your kids will do everything right, and He will change the world forever.”

Just imagine if Abram had known that it would take almost another two thousand years for the time to be just right for Jesus to be born, the Messiah, Savior, and King of the world! But what does any of that even mean? Why is it important that Jesus is our King? What does that mean to us? Remember how I told you that the descendants of Abram weren’t sure if the Messiah would be humble, gentle, and rejected or a mighty warrior? Well, let me tell you about the mighty warrior King we see in the Gospel of Mark. We see Jesus fighting against demons, even a whole legion of demons at once, and destroying them. Jesus also destroys sickness, disabilities, and every kind of disease and even brings people back from being dead. It’s like Jesus goes into evil places and rescues people. When Jesus is fighting the forces of evil, He isn’t messing around—no mercy and no forgiveness. But when Jesus is dealing with people who are hurting, He is gentle and kind. He treats demons one way and people another. In fact, we rarely see Jesus being unkind, but when He is, it’s because He is talking to the religious leaders who aren’t helping the people and who are even hurting them. Some of the religious leaders followed Jesus, but not very many. Most of them were trying to keep the people from believing that Jesus is God’s Messiah, the King. It was the same thing as telling people that God isn’t God either. Many of them, especially the chief priests and the high priest, were just jealous and were afraid they would lose their power. If they lost their power, they would also lose their money because they were making a lot by using the Temple as a business. They had teamed up with the cruel Romans, who had soldiers everywhere, so everyone had to do what they said. Others were just afraid that if people were listening to Jesus, they wouldn’t listen to them anymore. It can be really hard when you are used to people wanting to hear what you have to say, and then all of a sudden, those people are listening to someone else instead. And especially when that someone else can work miracles! Who can compete with that?

Jesus is a King who shows one side of Himself to demons and another side to those who are hurting. Jesus knows who the real enemy is. Jesus wants everyone to turn away from doing bad things, from making other people’s lives miserable, and to follow Him instead. You see, there are two Kingdoms in the world—the Kingdom of Heaven, where God rules over everything and everyone and things are good, and the Kingdom of the Beast, where rich people hurt poor people, and strong people hurt weaker people; where some people believe that they are better and more deserving of good things than others and people hate each other for totally stupid reasons. When we choose Jesus as our King, when we believe that He crushed the head of the Serpent like God promised Adam and Eve, that Jesus is how God promised to bless the world through Abram’s family, that it was Jesus who went through those animals disguised as smoke and fire and promised to fix the covenant between God and Abram that was broken by his descendants, it means that we are choosing to live by the rules of the Kingdom of God—to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love other people as we want to be loved and we would want people to treat the people we love. Anything that you wouldn’t want someone to do to hurt the person you love most in the whole world, serving Jesus means that you wouldn’t do that to anyone else either.

To have Jesus as King means that He is our example and that He is the only human being that we can really trust totally and obey completely because He will never tell us to do anything that is evil. God wanted us to have an example to follow—but Noah wasn’t perfect, and neither were Abram or Sarah, Moses, Aaron, David, or anyone else. They are going to do really awful things sometimes. We have them in the Bible to teach us that there isn’t a human on earth, no matter how special or chosen by God, who is a perfect example. Goodness sake, God chose me to teach you guys, but it doesn’t mean that I am right about everything I will teach you, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t get pretty salty when I am cranky or feel like I have been backed into a corner or am embarrassed. I am still trying to become more like Jesus. I have a long way to go. And so, if someone was to tell you, “That Miss Tyler can be mean,” you can say, “Yeah, I know, but she’s working on it and feels really bad about it when it happens.” Or if another person says, “Miss Tyler is wrong about such and such,” you can say, “Yeah, sometimes when she is teaching me, she tells me that she found out she was wrong and teaches me something different instead. She says we are all wrong about something. I don’t listen to her because I think that everything she says is right. I listen to her because grown-ups force me to.” Or how about, “Miss Tyler did this really awful thing once,” and you can say, “That’s why Miss Tyler tells us to follow Jesus and not just do whatever she has done. Only Jesus can be totally trusted.”

That’s why God gave us all these stories about how the people He chose did awful things—so that we wouldn’t think that we could follow those people instead of Jesus. Some people do terrible things when they are scared, and others when they want something that doesn’t belong to them. Sometimes people do something they think is right because their culture (which is the world and people around them) tells them it is right because they don’t know God well enough yet to understand that the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t like that. Sometimes, we will see things in the Bible that we wouldn’t ever think were okay today, and we’ll be like, “What the heck were they thinking???” But to them, it was a normal part of life. God isn’t going to fix everything right away; He had to be patient, and He is still being patient. Look how long it took Him to get us to stop making people work as slaves! Jesus told His disciples that some of the commandments that Moses gave the children of Israel in the desert would be because the people’s hearts were hard. So they were still allowed to do some evil things, but Jesus always told people to be perfect, like God is perfect. If you wouldn’t want God to do something to you, like enslave you, then don’t do it to anyone else. Jesus showed us that loving others is about serving them and understanding that we aren’t better than anyone else. He did that by showing us that even the greatest person who ever lived, who could work miracles and raise the dead and who was one with God at Creation, would die just so that He could fight Satan and sin and death and all his demons and win once and for all.

Satan looked at Jesus and probably thought to himself, “I need to stop Him, or everyone in the world will follow Him, and they won’t listen to me and do things my way anymore. If everyone listens to Him, there will be no more murder, stealing, hunger, cruelty, or hatred. There will be no more war or torture. Kids will be able to play anywhere they want with no one watching to make sure they are safe. I won’t have anyone who wants to do things my way once they all start living like He wants. I need to get rid of Him, but I need to do it in a way that is so terrible, embarrassing, and shameful that no one will even want to admit they ever knew Him. People will either be ashamed that they thought He was the Messiah, or will believe that He is a criminal, or will be too scared to even admit they know Him because they won’t want to be killed too.” Satan didn’t know that he was being tricked into having to come face-to-face with Jesus, the all-powerful Son of God. When Jesus died, He went to Satan’s turf (where Satan was strongest and most powerful) and beat the heck out of him, and now (even though he still causes trouble) Satan is dying. He isn’t giving up trying to trick us the way he did with Adam and Eve, trying to tell us not to obey God because we can decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. If Jesus followed God, with all the miracles He did and after creating the earth and everything in it, it has to be the only smart choice. Obeying God was why, when Jesus was murdered, Satan couldn’t fight against Him. Jesus didn’t have any reason to be ashamed, and He wasn’t guilty. Satan had never had to deal with anyone truly good and perfect before. But, by the time he figured out his mistake, it was too late.

That’s why we must have Jesus as our very real King and why we need to understand the importance of living in His Kingdom the way He wants us to. The more we do things His way, the bigger and better His Kingdom grows, but when we do things Satan’s way, we are just keeping that dude alive because he gets to hurt people through us. I mean, he isn’t doing it—we are doing it. When we are mean or bullies, if we steal, or spread lies or embarrassing things about other people, if we don’t keep our promises to help people do what is good, and when we don’t treat people like God loves them just as much as He loves us, then we are part of Satan’s Kingdom. That’s how Satan’s Kingdom works, and that kind of terrible behavior is called the Mark of the Beast. The prophet Ezekiel tells us that God has a Mark of His kingdom, and John tells us that Satan has one too. It isn’t anything a person can see, but it is about who we are following, and a person can pretend to be following God but really be doing terrible things when no one is looking. God sees us always and loves us always, so we can trust Him to live like He wants right now.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will learn how to trust Jesus not just as your Savior but as your King too.  

Parents–Genesis 16 has some very sensitive themes in it so on Friday I will be uploading a special teaching on my grownup channel covering the material if you want to teach the material that I can’t teach.

For someone who is talked about so much, the Bible sure doesn’t say much about Nimrod! Or does it? This week we are going to look at what the phrases “powerful hunter” and “in the sight of the Lord” mean before having fun next week talking about all the different stories people have made up about Nimrod.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers, or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 10)

So, this week and next week, we’re going to talk about a mysterious Bible figure and some really cool archaeology about lion hunting. I’ve told you all in the past that the less that is written in the Bible about someone, the more people come along and fill in the blanks with some really crazy stuff. This week we are going to talk about what the Bible says about Nimrod, one of the descendants of Ham, what the Bible doesn’t say about him, and whether or not he shows up in world history. Next week we’re going to talk about all the things that different people have made up about Nimrod and all their “what if” stories. The reason we are going to do that is because a lot of people take the “what if” stories seriously and they even fight over it so we are going to see who and where and when those stories come from. Some of them are from the time of Jesus and some are a lot closer to our time—even though they say they are telling the historical truth! Sometimes they were making things up and at other times people mistook “what if” stories for history, and sometimes they just had no archaeology to work with at all because it hadn’t been found yet so they were doing the best they could. So, this will be a fun and crazy two weeks but one of the things that I spent a lot of time studying years ago was ancient Babylonian religion and so when I heard these stories, I knew there was something terribly wrong because their facts didn’t match up with what we know. So, what does the Bible actually say about Nimrod?

Cush fathered Nimrod, who began to be powerful in the land. He was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord. That is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord.” His kingdom started with Babylon, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-ir, Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh and the great city Calah. (Gen 10:8-11) Cush fathered Nimrod, who was the first to become a great warrior on earth. (I Chron 1:10) They will shepherd the land of Assyria with the sword, the land of Nimrod with a drawn blade. So he will rescue us from Assyria when it invades our land, when it marches against our territory. (Micah 5:6)

And that’s all the Bible ever says about Nimrod but if you google his name you will find that there are pages and pages telling us all about him and what he did and there are so many books written about him and who he was but the problem is that they are all make-believe because there isn’t enough about him to write a book about. They won’t have any footnotes linked to anything found in cuneiform tablets (clay tablets that are carved with letters and baked, which makes them last a long time), or any papyri (ancient paper made from reeds), and no ancient historians talk about him either or even about someone who specifically did all the things the Bible talks about under a different name. And that shouldn’t surprise us because humans weren’t writing a lot of those kinds of records back then, way before Abraham, so a lot of information was lost. It doesn’t mean that Nimrod wasn’t real, it just means that all we know about him for sure is in the Bible, and the Bible didn’t think he was important enough to talk much about even though people today talk about him a lot. You see, when we don’t know much of anything about a person, folks really like to make that person into whatever they want! Does that mean that the Bible isn’t telling us anything? Nope—but what it is telling us isn’t obvious to most people who haven’t studied ancient kings and how they are talked about! So, this is actually going to be really cool and fun!

What do we know? We know that Nimrod was a descendant of Cush—maybe his son or grandson or maybe even later than that because in ancient times, they didn’t always give the full family tree. We talked about that last week. They wanted to get to the point! It would be like if someone said, “Queen Elizabeth, who was descended from Queen Victoria…” and it wouldn’t matter that she was her great-great-granddaughter because they would only mention the really famous people they wanted you to be thinking about. But, let’s say that Nimrod was the son of Cush, which he might have been! Totally possible! That would make him the great-grandson of Noah, and the grandson of Ham, and the son of Cush. But wait? All the rest of the family headed toward Africa! Why does Nimrod’s kingdom begin in Babylon when it is 1,641 miles away from Egypt? What the heck? One, it means that maybe it took him a heckuva long time to get there because that’s not where his family seems to have gone. The answer to how and why he got there is a mystery but some other information is right there in the Bible if we know the idioms of the ancient world. Do you remember about idioms from the first episode where we played the idiom game? An idiom is a saying that sounds like it means one thing when it actually means something else—like yesterday I was so embarrassed when I told my friend Pastor Matthew that a friend of mine would be coming to his congregation “with bells on” and Pastor Matthew didn’t know what that meant—because I am old enough to be his mom. So, I felt like a super old lady when I had to explain to him that when someone says they will “be there with bells on” it means that they are super excited about being there.

So what’s our important idiom? We see it twice in Gen 10:8, “Cush fathered Nimrod, who began to be powerful in the land. He was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord. That is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord.” And if it isn’t obvious to you what the idiom is, that’s okay—we don’t use it anymore. We actually have two idioms but the first is “powerful hunter.” And a lot of people think that means he was a giant who went out and hunted for critters to eat but that’s more like what Esau was—and we will come to him later in Genesis.  In the ancient world, that was how kings were described—as mighty hunters. Their palaces were carved and painted with murals of the king hunting lions, because that was the way for kings to show how tough and manly they were. I am going to link a super cool article from the British Museum about it, which talks a lot about how popular this was and especially in Assyria, where the Bible talks about Nimrod having a Kingdom. The art goes back 3000 years before Jesus was born, which lines up pretty good with when Nimrod might have lived. And these kings would also claim that their gods had given them the special ability to kill lions, who were very feared by people and with good reason.

A lot of people think that lions have only been in Africa but that isn’t true. They roamed the roads all through the ancient world—in Israel, in Asia, and in Africa. It was one of the jobs of an ancient king to hunt them and keep the roads safe. I have three quotes that were written on Ashurbanipal’s palace walls, “In the steppe, a widespread place, raging lions, a ferocious mountain breed, attacked me and surrounded the chariot, the vehicle of my royal majesty. By the command of the god Ashur and the goddess Ishtar, the great gods…I scattered the pack of those lions.” See that? A powerful hunter kept the roads of his kingdom safe from dangerous lions that would attack travelers and livestock (that’s also something David did in the Bible). And he called it a command from his god Ashur—which is why his name is Ashurbanipal because it means “Ashur is the creator of the heir.” And it is a good thing he thought he had permission from Ishtar because she only had two favorite animals, one was an owl and the other was a lion because she was the goddess of war! Like Ashurbanipal, people often had the names of their gods as part of their own name—they did it in Israel too. Like Jehosaphat, which means that Yahweh (the name of our God) has judged or Yahweh rules. It’s cool when your name is saying something nice about God! All my name means is doorkeeper morning rose-twig.

Here’s another one, “I, Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, while carrying out my princely sport, seized a lion that was born in the steppe by its tail and, through the command of the gods… shattered its skull with the mace that was in my hand.” Here he’s saying again that he can kill lions because the gods commanded him and gave him the strength. And one more, “I, Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, to whom the god Ashur and the goddess Ishtar have granted outstanding strength, set up the fierce bow of the goddess Ishtar — the lady of battle — over the lions that I had killed. I made an offering over them and poured a libation of wine over them.” So, he’s describing all the ways he is killing these lions and, oh, by the way, it’s because the gods and goddesses are totally on his side, like, “Don’t mess with me, dudes, or you are messing with their favorite!” And if you think this guy is totally full of himself and bragging too much, yeah, he is, that’s how they talked about themselves and how other people talked about them too!

And that’s also how people talked about Nimrod, only the god that they seemed to have attributed his success to was the God of the Bible and not some foreign god, as people did with Ashurbanipal. As we will see next week, during the lifetime of Jesus, many thought that Nimrod was a big hero serving God because of how they read these verses. When they said he was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord, that’s the same as saying that he was a mighty king serving God. And that’s our second idiom, “in the sight of the Lord.” It shows up quite a bit in the Bible. The first time is when Adam and Eve are hiding from God, they don’t want to be in His presence, in His sight where He can see them (of course, He could see them anyway). The next time is with Cain, when he runs away from the presence, or sight, of God. Neither of them wanted to be in God’s sight but Nimrod isn’t trying to hide at all! Whether it is good or bad, and we don’t know, God sees Nimrod and everyone knows it. And God told Abraham to walk in His presence too, using the same exact Hebrew words. Curioser and curioser, right? So far, we know that Nimrod was a powerful king who was walking in the presence of God. Hmmmm…

And then we have all that talk about his Kingdom, a kingdom that began with Babylon. But does that mean he founded and built Babylon or that he came in with an army and took control of Babylon, because it was already there? As we will see in chapter 11, the people build the tower in the place called Bavel (aka Babylon), but Nimrod is never mentioned at all. So, we don’t actually know if he was before Babylon, and was part of building it, or after Babylon, and took it over—which would have been a lot easier once everyone’s languages got messed up and they scattered all over the place. It’s a mystery that the Bible doesn’t answer. We know from other histories that Babylon has been around since long before Abraham was born, at least 2300 years before Jesus was born. Archaeologists have actually found it and have been digging it up! And we also know where Erech is, also called Uruk, that’s southeast of Babylon. And Akkad is well known, northwest of Babylon. We have no idea what Calneh is, that’s a big mystery, but then there are a lot of places in the Bible that archaeologists haven’t found yet. These were all in the land of Shinar, which we call Sumer. Archaeology tells us that the oldest civilizations on earth are there, places where people lived and worked together and traded and bought and sold, so that sounds about right! Then, it says that Nimrod left those places and went ever further north into Assyria and built the great city of Nineveh, and if you know the story of Jonah, you know about Ninevah! And it was not filled with fish slappers and they didn’t worship fish—Veggie Tales was just being funny so that you would pay attention to the story of Jonah. Calah is called Nimrud now. And you know what? You can search the internet and find a lot of totally cool archaeological stuff like ancient city walls and temples and all that stuff. I will try to remember to link some sites in the transcript for you.  As for the other places, there are many debates because they seem to be words referring to city squares and canals—which makes sense because you totally need canals when you want to have water for your cities and crops!

Who was Nimrod? We just don’t know. Different people have tried to link him to different historical figures like Sargon of Akkad, Hammurabi of Babylon (we will talk about him more when we get to Exodus), or Shulgi of Ur and you can find YouTube videos making it sound like we have it figured out for sure but we don’t know for sure because, so far, no one has uncovered records of anyone doing all those things. And that’s okay. Sometimes things happened so long ago that it’s amazing we know anything at all! But, archaeologists are always finding new places to dig and we just never know when they are going to uncover more. As it is, there are over half a million tablets already found and some claim that there are as many as two million. They all have to be cleaned up and translated—that’s a lot of work. Maybe some of them will solve the mystery or maybe not. Did you know that when they uncovered a library in Ninevah (Jonah again!) they found like 22,000 tablets? Each one was written on and baked so they would be preserved. And there aren’t very many people who are trained to understand and translate them—hey, maybe you could be one of the translators or maybe you will go out in a team to find them. Not me though—I am not good with languages. We are all different, right? We are all smart in different ways. And we need all kinds of people to know how to do all kinds of things.

What we do know about Nimrod is what we’ve talked about already. Nimrod was king over a huge area in a time with no cars or airplanes. He built a huge empire! The area he had control over was not that much smaller than the state of California! Genesis 10 is telling us that he was the first person in the world to be a king over such a large area with so many great cities. We don’t know whether he was part of building Uruk, Akkad, or Babel or not. He might have taken control over it after the people building it scattered for all we know, but the Bible does tell us that when he left there, he actually built Ninevah and that was a really big city! He probably had soldiers who were loyal to him, to control such a big area.

What I can tell you is that Moses’s original audience would have been very impressed with the story of Nimrod. He would have been seen as someone like Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon—a guy who kicks butt and takes names, really tough and charismatic (which means that people admired him enough to follow him and do what he wants them to do—like build cities and canals and go to war). Because he was called a mighty hunter, that would have told them that he was hunting down and killing the lions that the people were all scared of and doing a good job as king. Isn’t it funny that we can get all that from just a few verses? For a long time, no one really knew what it meant—not until those archaeologists got to work and found out about kings being called mighty hunters. Someone in one of the Genesis books I have been reading called Nimrod “the ultimate ancient man” because he was what is called an “ideal.” An ideal is someone who just seems to have everything and can do everything. Some people look at movie stars or sports stars or musicians and call them “ideal people.” Kinda like calling them perfect, but no one is perfect. The Bible is saying that this guy is “legendary” in that he was just amazing in all that he accomplished.

But was he good or evil? The Bible says nothing about that. Oh sure, people have theories and there are so many stories about Nimrod that it isn’t even funny (okay, some of them are funny), but if we are going on the Bible as it is written, you can make a case for him being good or him being terrible. Remember how we have talked about all those “what if” stories? That they are a good way to explore what might have happened or maybe what God might have been trying to say to the people who originally heard this story, and maybe they all knew about Nimrod and so they were totally understanding and nodding to themselves as Moses told them about him. You know, it is almost the same thing as when Moses told them all about Enoch in Genesis 5:21-24–

Enoch was 65 years old when he fathered Methuselah. And after he fathered Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and fathered other sons and daughters. So, Enoch’s life lasted 365 years. Enoch walked with God; then he was not there because God took him.

And a thousand years after Moses wrote that down, people started writing legends about Enoch, and Jewish authors even wrote some amazing fiction about him! Jewish authors used to love to write fictional stories about Bible characters during the three hundred years before Jesus was born. And after Jesus was born, even more stories were written. Those stories were called Midrash and Aggadah. They are stories that “fill in the blanks” so that the Rabbis could teach important lessons. Kinda like the boy who cried wolf, which is a great story that teaches us the importance of not telling lies. And boy oh boy the things they came up with—different authors told some very different stories about Nimrod for thousands of years. All because people hate a mystery, or maybe they love mysteries because they get to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. Enoch is mentioned twice in the New Testament as an example of faithfulness—because that is what it means to walk with God—but Enoch never says a word and we have no idea about anything he ever did. We know a lot more about Nimrod than about Enoch for sure, but what most people think they know, or believe they know, actually doesn’t come from the Bible. We just heard someone else tell a story and when we read what the Bible says, in our minds we are thinking about that story and it changes what we think we see there. Nimrod is never talked about again, except to have his name mentioned twice more. Once was in a family tree and the other time it was just calling Assyria the “land of Nimrod” and that’s it.

Was Nimrod at the Tower of Babel or not? We don’t know because he isn’t even mentioned in the same chapter. If he was there, what was he doing? There are a lot of different stories about that and we will talk about some of them next week. Sometimes he was the good guy and sometimes he was the bad guy. Some of the stories are crazy and others are more reasonable, but what they all have in common is that they are guesses. Some guesses are better than others. Some are absolutely impossible—like the one about him marrying a woman who was born over a thousand years after he died and their having a god for a son!

Isn’t it strange? We have this guy who was written about as the ultimate guy in the ancient world, king of the world, and all he gets is a tiny little paragraph and doesn’t even come up again. That’s an important lesson for all of us. The people who seem like a big deal to us are usually not very important in the long run. Sure, he had a huge kingdom and he built canals and cities but we don’t even know who he was anymore. He has been forgotten by everyone except for in the Bible. He has people making up stories about him because we know so little about him. How would you like it if you went from “King of the world” to someone who is so totally unknown that everyone is just making guesses about? I know I hate it when people make up stories about me—even when they are true. And I am not really very important at all. Nimrod was important—he was probably the most important man alive during his life and now he is just a nobody. But think about Jesus—He didn’t lead an army or build cities or canals and he died very young, when he was in His early thirties. Not only did he die but He died as a criminal! He never killed anyone but He sure went to war against Satan and his demons and sickness and made blind people see again and deaf people hear and paralyzed people walk. He didn’t live in a fancy house and He never had servants! The people who had Him killed thought to themselves, “Well, that’s over, everyone will forget him now!” But people have never stopped writing about Him or talking about Him because Jesus was the true “ultimate man.” He wasn’t anything like Nimrod the “mighty hunter.”

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.

Remember my huge series on the Maccabean Revolt and the first Hannukah? Well, this teaching picks up where that left off – with a new generation of Hasmoneans who were not worthy successors to their famous kin. That is actually a common theme scripturally – a good man having bad kids! This teaching is a solid PG/PG-13 because of the intra-family violence which some kids might find disturbing.

How will this tragically evil line of priest-kings plunge all of Israel back under foreign rule?

Over the next 14 weeks, we will explore the political insanity that marked the era from 104 BCE to 70 AD and beyond. You will never look at your Bible and the power players from the first centuries BCE and CE the same ever again. But most importantly, the Gospels are going to become more and more real to your kids as they see the events firmly rooted in history.

Hasmonean Family Tree